“With Christmas approaching, you can feel the intensity of the whole experience, it's just getting warmer and warmer,” says Paul Hilton backstage at the Old Vic, where he is currently playing a very chilly, hunched and pinched Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol... who of course then finds that warmth within himself in Dickens’ classic tale, with the help of a ghost or four.
This returning production at the Old Vic is the lauded one written by Jack Thorne, with Hilton following the likes of Rhys Ifans and John Simm in a role which really brings out depth of feeling of Dickens’ tale.
“Jack's take on A Christmas Carol is very humane. His emphasis is essentially being love and charity and kindness and goodness and the potential for change within us all.”
Hilton saw Simm play the part from the audience, and says it’s peculiar to now be “within the organism”, especially since it takes him far out of his usual comfort zone.
“At certain points in the evening, there's no filter between myself and the audience, and that's an unusual thing for an actor,” he says, “To strip away the artifice of costume and actually speak to the audience as Paul Hilton is a very challenging thing for me. The connections are so palpable, literally shaking hands and moving around the theatre and making everybody feel like they're included in this event.
Having worked a lot in naturalism and fourth wall drama, this is a very different kind of thing, and I'm really, really loving it.”
In this highly engaging approach, its the type of show which takes the feel-good factor innate in the story up a further couple of notches, to revel in the uniquely fulfilling nature of going to the theatre. Hilton has been on our TVs recently in Slow Horses and Silent Witness, but he’s a theatre man through and through and speaks with feeling about the experience actors and audience alike come for.
“Connectivity is the theme that is running through my work - only connect,” he says, “This is all we have. The most important thing is to be in the moment and in live theatre, you're in the perfect medium for that. There's no CGI. There's no interface here. These are real tears. This is real sweat. And it's all happening in real time. We're all here now
To be doing that in this particular story, which is looking at the possibility of change and how we might be more philanthropic with our generosity, and more compassionate. We're all in a very squeezed situation in this country, so I think it's more important than ever to be telling this story right now.”
Fundamentally for Hilton, Scrooge has to be seen as an “everyman”, as opposed to some strange miser.
“We’re all Scrooge in some way. We're all trying to find our way through this thing called life, to quote Prince.”
Thorne’s writing puts the emphasis on Scrooge’s own personal hell, and Hilton and director Matthew Warchus unravel what put him there in a stirringly emotional journey.
“We take that villain, who's so loathsome and twisted and broken and fragile, and then we pop him open like a Chocolate Orange, and have a good look at why he's the way he is.
Jack's version beautifully takes us back through these events of his past, and we begin to see why he might be the way he has become. As an audience member, you go from loathing this man to liking him or loving him, because you've experienced his truth, you've seen him - he's been seen.”
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This latter aspect has struck a chord with Hilton. Born in Oldham in 1970, his was bitten by the bug doing his first school play, Oliver Twist, at 13, and was taken under the wing of a drama teacher called Colin Snell, who Hilton says ways a “visionary” who once, “remortgaged his house to take us to the Edinburgh Festival, that’s how devoted he was.” Hilton calls himself a “dreamer, I was then, and still am now,” with this being in the most creative sense. He’s always been attuned to the class system and representation, and whose stories are being told on stage, and the opportunities for audiences to go see those stories. He’s been involved in saving the Oldham Coliseum - a crucial training ground for him as a young actor - knowing how important these spaces are for allowing people to see and be seen.
“In Oldham the theatre was going to be taken away from us, meaning the nearest one would have been in Manchester, which is inaccessible for a lot of local children. It was vital to me that there is a working active producing theater in Oldham, because if you can't see it, you can't be it.
A Christmas Carol is a really vital story about kind of being able to address your own stubborn nature and change yourself for the better, and that's an enduring theme. But if you can't actually experience that journey of empathy and you're never going reach for it.”
It’s a crucial point and one which illustrates the value of culture, something that you’d think is self-evident. So self-evident in fact that a country should recognise it as the very soul of the nation, especially a nation with such a world-beating cultural tradition. Instead, government after government continue to devalue the arts, treating it like, as Hilton puts it, “a frivolous pastime,” not the essential that it is. “The truth is, I wouldn’t be alive were it not for drama. If I didn’t have this outlet for expression, I don’t know what I would have done.”
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It’s no coincidence that while people struggle under the cost of living, the demand for live music and theatre remains high - people need it, it helps them make sense of the times, and to think and to feel. Yet as an underfunded sector, while audiences want the work, the artists creating the work are struggling, whether its bands or actors trying to survive while doing what they love.
Hilton has had a rough period on that front in recent times and says he’s changing hit approach to meet the challenge: “I predominately do theatre but it’s difficult to sustain with the cost of living, and I’m having to look towards TV and film as a means of revenue.” But staying away from the theatre is hard, and with a production like this one, which is so visibly moving people to high emotion, all the more so.
He says he’s very connected to Scrooge, being working class and struggling with debt, with a similar powerful connection to his sister and mother, “an intensity to my domestic situation which echoes Scrooge and Dickens.” And having children has brought him close to his inner child... all of which means by the time the show reaches its climax the boundaries between actor and character start to disappear.
“I knew I could bring a lot of that to Scrooge in the later stages when he's released from his oyster shell. And it's very genuine, the joy and happiness that I feel during this, because the show happens in real time.
I never leave the stage, and it's like a strange fever dream. There is this element of transformation, so when the happiness hits - and the dopamine and the adrenaline - the walls come down and then the audience is exposed and revealed to Scrooge.
There is this genuine euphoria that I feel then. An audience is witnessing that for real. It's not fake or acting. You can see the possibility of transformation before your eyes. And I certainly feel it. I can bring my foulest temper to a performance, and it will be alchemically transmuted into joy and happiness within two and a half hours.
And that's genuine magic.”
A Christmas Carol is at the Old Vic until 10 January 2026
